Criss Cross (1949)

Director: Robert Siodmak

Writer: Daniel Fuchs

Based on the 1934 novel by Don Tracy

Actors: Burt Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo, Dan Duryea

Cinematography: Franz Planer
Music: Miklos Rozsa

Running time: 88 mins.                                                                                                          

Crime and Fate on Bunker Hill

     Criss Cross is a tight, well-written, and exciting example of 1940s film noir. Director Robert Siodmak uses all the fine expressionistic touches he acquired in the Weimar Germany of the 1920s. Beautiful black and white deep-focus photography along with wide angle pan shots give the film that dreamlike look that one finds in the best classic noir films. 

     The plot itself is quite deterministic and based on the premise that fate determines our actions and ultimately our end. Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) and Anna Dundee (Yvonne De Carlo), the principal characters, highlight this fact; their fate ultimately leading them to their predestined deaths. A series of unplanned occurrences propel them on a course that ends in doom. Steve keeps running into Anna, his femme fatale ex-wife, who has a history of looking out for herself alone. His mother and friends warn him, and he knows she’s bad news, but still he plunges headlong into the abyss. They hurt each other whenever they’re together, but they always wind up in each other’s arms--- and that’s the way they die. 

     Siodmak emphasizes the idea of fate by often framing Steve and Anna at critical moments in windows or mirrors. In one very effective scene Anna is seated in front of a window in a flophouse hotel, the Sunshine Apartments on 3rd Street on Bunker Hill listening to Steve, Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea), her current L.A. gangster husband, and some other crooks plan an armored car robbery. Behind her, clearly visible, are the Angels Flight funicular cars going up and down, criss crossing each other like two fateful ships passing in the night. The armored car robbery itself--- a total disaster--- is depicted in a way that stresses unreality and instances of insuperable fate. Siodmak films the armored car entering the plant at odd angles emphasizing the impossibility of the robbery and the futility of its outcome. The gunfight in the smoke and explosions intensifies the unreal aspect of the scene.

     There is also a hospital sequence that beautifully epitomizes noir paranoia. Steve, who is seriously wounded after the attempted robbery, is totally vulnerable and defenseless in a hospital bed. He knows the gangster he just double crossed will send someone to silence him, but there’s nothing he can do about it except lie in bed and wait. At one point in a mirror (again a nice touch!) he even sees his executioner sitting just outside his hospital room, but fatefully convinces himself that the man is innocent. Even after he knows the man has come to take him to his death, and he bribes him to take him to Anna instead, he naively thinks the man will just take the money and split. But his fate is sealed. He and Anna die in a rain of bullets with the sound of waves breaking on the Palos Verdes beach below and the shrill of police car sirens growing louder in the distance.

     Besides being a quintessential 1940s film noir, Criss Cross presents a time capsule view of Los Angeles in the years immediately after the Second World War. The film opens with a nighttime aerial pan shot of the city with all its lights flashing like diamonds on black velvet. The camera first centers on City Hall, then moves across town, over a darkened Bunker Hill, and finally zeros in on the tragic protagonists, Steve and Anna, clandestinely meeting in a dark crowded parking lot (which I believe is the one next to the Hollywood Palladium). This opening shot and most of the early scenes give us a view of an L.A. that has long since vanished: a city of noisy post-war bars and night clubs with rumba bands, big red street cars, flashy women in ankle-strapped shoes and light summer dresses, cops in fedoras and gabardine suits---- Southern California in the Truman years.

      The story is told primarily in flashbacks and voiceover reminiscences of Steve, who after an absence of several years returns to L.A. to work in his father’s armored car company and eventually gets mixed up, through his re-involvement with his ex-wife, in a payroll robbery. We first see Steve getting off a streetcar which has just exited the Hill Street Tunnel (demolished in 1955) at the intersection of Hill and Temple Streets in the former Court Hill section of Bunker Hill, just about where the present-day L.A. County Court House now stands. He then climbs the stairway up Bunker Hill to his family residence at 215 North Hill, a large rambling 1906 Queen Ann style home.  

     Bunker Hill in the late 40s was approaching its last years as a once upscale, now downscale residential neighborhood of one family Victorian mansions, cheap rooming house hotels, and small mom and pop businesses. Twenty years later it would be totally  gone and eventually covered with skyscraper bank buildings, the Music Center, and other massive steel and glass structures that form today’s L.A. skyline.

     Siodmak also makes good use of Union Station, both inside and out. The views of the station presented in Criss Cross can give present-day Angelenos and visitors an idea of just how well the restoration of Union Station some twenty years ago was carried out--- it’s one of the few Los Angeles icons, other than City Hall and the Hollywood sign, that still faithfully reflects that era. Union Station, built in 1939, came just in time to handle the great numbers of people who flocked to L. A., during World  War II and after in the post-war boom years. But with the expansion of air travel in the 50s and 60s, and a falloff of train passengers, it fell into a state of neglect. Now, thanks to its faithful restoration and to the greatly expanded L.A. subway and surface rail Metro system, along with the Metrolink suburban system and the still dependable Amtrak system, Union Station has again become a transport hub.

     Robert Siodmak and Universal Studios, as well as all the other great directors and producers who turned out what was then thought of as short-term escapist entertainment---- noirish crime thrillers, are owed a great deal of thanks by present-day viewers. They didn’t realize it at the time, but seventy plus years later their films act as a window on the past and a look (if only a short one) at a great city at a particular moment in its history.